Modern computer systems allow you to input letters of national alphabets directly from the keyboard. In order to handle a variety of input encodings used for different groups of languages and/or on different computer platforms LaTeX employs the inputenc package to set up input encoding. In this case the package properly displays characters in the French alphabet. To use this package add the next line to the preamble of your document:

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

The recommended input encoding is utf-8. You can use other encodings depending on your operating system.

To extended the default LaTeX capabilities, for proper hyphenation and translating the names of the document elements, import the babel package for the French language. The language option should be passed to the \documentclass command.

\documentclass[french]{article}\usepackage{babel}

Then french option is recommended for a generic document, if you need Canadian localization you can use canadien instead.

In this document an additional command is used in the section of the preamble for Language-specific features. \usepackage[autolanguage]{numprint} changes the formatting of the numbers written inside the braces of the \nombre{} command.

Notice also that the elements in a list have changed, they have a different format.

Sometimes for formatting reasons some words have to be broken up in syllables separated by a - (hyphen) to continue the word in a new line. For example, mathématiques could become mathéma-tiques. The package babel, whose usage was described in the previous section, usually does a good job breaking up the words correctly, but if this is not the case you can use a couple of commands in your preamble.

\usepackage{hyphenat}\hyphenation{mathéma-tiques récu-pérer}

The first command will import the package hyphenat and the second line is a list of space-separated words with defined hyphenation rules. On the other side, if you want a word not to be broken automatically, use the {\nobreak word} command within your document.